The best of Marketing Automation 2018: How does Salesforce Pardot rank?

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of Marketing Automation products on the market globally. With an array of features to consider and price points to meet, it’s no wonder business buyers want to get more ‘bang for their buck’ with their MarTech stack. That’s why many people turn to advice from the outside to answer the question: “which marketing automation tool should I buy?”

G2 Crowd is a website that hosts real-time and unbiased user reviews on SaaS vendors (software-as-a-service). Their mission is to provide “insights [for] business professionals..to gain confidence in their buying decisions”. Now reaching 420,300+ validated user reviews, this “collective wisdom” has become extremely popular.

Pardot placed in the ‘Leaders’ section of G2 Crowd’s Grid® for Marketing Automation 2018, which looks at a vendor’s market presence vs. customer satisfaction.  

Qualifying for the Grid

The G2 Crowd Grid® for Marketing Automation is published every spring

An algorithm is applied to website review data, social media and other online sources in order to to calculate the customer Satisfaction and Market Presence scores in real time.

In order to qualify, a tool must:

• Automate (two or more): email/social media/SMS/digital ads.
• Have advanced email marketing capabilities: A/B testing, spam filter testing, scheduling, segmentation.
• Is a central marketing database
• Allow dynamic segmentation
• Generate forms and landing pages
• Lead nurturing and lead scoring
• Automate communications based on specific actions, triggers or periods of time
• Provide analytics to track the entire campaign lifecycle (ie. campaign ROI).

Not every ‘marketing automation’ tool can even get a look in!

Where does Pardot rank?

I already mentioned that Pardot placed in the ‘Leaders’ section of G2 Crowd’s Grid® for Marketing Automation 2018.

Out of 3 market segment grids (small-business, mid-market, enterprise), Pardot sits the highest on the mid-market matrix

Despite not sitting at the pinnacle of the ‘Leaders’ section, there are a number of things to note:

• Pardot is specific to the Salesforce customer base
• Pending product innovation and future releases will boost this ranking

Pardot’s Strengths

Customers rate each vendor on ease of use, whether it meets their requirements, and how easy they are to do business with. These are collated as a %, with an overall % satisfaction calculated in addition.

Pardot scored 90% overall, ‘ease of use’ (78%), ‘meets requirements’ (81%), and ‘ease of doing business with’ (81%).